Using Expressive Traceability Relationships for Ensuring Consistent Process Model Refinement

Traceability is widely recognized as being crucial for various software development-related applications, including maintenance, quality assurance, and change management. However, most existing approaches do not augment traceability relationships with semantics going beyond natural language descriptions, thus limiting the potential for automatizing relevant activities such as consistency checking or change propagation. Based on a case study being concerned with preserving the consistency of business process model refinements, this paper introduces a generic, technology-independent, yet expressive approach for defining semantically rich traceability relationships. The concept is instantiated and implemented on the basis of the ADOxx modeling platform and the GReQL query language.